Steven Rea

Try not to let the film's overbearingly jaunty score get in the way. The Lady in the Van is quite a feat.

Offers a crushing view of humanity at its most desperate, and a view of one man's fevered efforts to find grace and dignity amid the horror.

45 Years is a study in economy, in the beautiful symmetry of word and image and music.

13 Hours, by its very subject matter, can't help but tap into the confluent veins of politics and patriotism.

Ergüven's film, beautifully shot and beautifully performed, cuts its storybook tone with starker, more brutal truths. Anger - aimed at a conservative social order and those complicit in maintaining it - courses through this sad, striking tale.

One of those what-were-they-thinking projects in which good talent is on very bad display.

The Revenant is exhilarating cinema.

Joy's entry into the world of entrepreneurship has the crazy trajectory of a rocket gone haywire, and Russell's movie is kind of haywire, too.

An epic work of self-indulgence and smug riffing, stringing together tropes from TV and screen westerns and closed-room whodunits, The Hateful Eight announces itself with all the pomp and circumstance of a mid-century cinema spectacle.

Mara and Blanchett are each extraordinary, working in the most organic and soul-stirring ways.

Symphonic and cinematic, full of melancholy and hushed magic.

The Force Awakens is half reboot, half remake, and all fun.

If Macbeth comes off at times like a Classics Illustrated comic-book adaptation (there is one, from 1955), it can also be quite moving, quite troubling, haunting, even.

It looks lovely in an art-directed way, and Eddie Redmayne, who won his Oscar earlier in the year for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything, looks lovely, too.

In-your-face polemic, with nowhere to go once the point has been made. Repeatedly.

Richly informative and fascinating.

An accomplished and compelling film by writer/director Josh Mond, James White is also pretty much a bummer.

It's a period piece full of colorful characters, natty costumes, jaunty music.

A kind of mad coming-of-age yarn embellished with lightning bolts and monsters made of cadaverous flesh.

Creed is corny like the old Rocky films, but riveting like the old Rocky films, too.

If Mockingjay - Part 1 is quieter and less flashy than its predecessors, that doesn't make it less satisfying.

Brooklyn is that rare period drama that doesn't lose itself in its dogged re-creation of another time.

Secret in Their Eyes is notable for its top-tier cast - Julia Roberts, Nicole Kidman, and Chiwetel Ejiofor are the leads - and for its utter lack of credulity and good sense.

If Mockingjay - Part 1 was walkier and talkier than its forerunners, Part 2 is pretty much all action - and lesser for it.

What Our Fathers Did is a movie about historical and filial responsibility, about repudiation, about acceptance, about the pain we inherit, and the pain that continues to be doled out.

Inspiring stuff, the stuff of Hollywood all the way back to Frank Capra and before: a story of scrappy underdogs, determined to get to the truth, and toppling the mighty in the process.

Ghosts haunt Heart of a Dog - but so, too, does love.

Barrymore and Collette bring life and charm to a screenplay that needs all the life and charm it can get.